by Marc Spitz
As recording commenced, Oldham’s master plan was slightly altered. The A-side would become the B-side and Faithfull’s debut single would now be “As Time Goes By” (now altered by Oldham, who staked a cowriting credit for the song, to “As Tears Go By”). Oldham knew it was the better song, but also sensed that the move would bolster Mick and Keith’s confidence and there’d be more like it in the future. “It was like a Francoise Hardy song, really,” Faithfull recalled. “Maybe that’s what Mick had picked up from me when we met. Slightly existential but with a dash of San Remo song festival. The Euro pop you might hear on a French jukebox, or rather it’s what Andrew saw in me at the party and told Mick to write—Andrew’s always been into that.” Oldham gave Faithfull the lyrics scrawled in Mick’s handwriting, which she studied without ample time to find the emotion. Like Mick, she was operating on instinct, following some mysterious and prescient voice. Songs were cut quickly then, not lived with. As a result, Faithfull’s version is a bit prim, as her nervous voice too carefully enunciates each line (“Rain fowl-ing on the ground”).
Mick and Keith watched in the booth as she sang it. Something came together on the track, the song that awoke something in Mick awoke something in Marianne Faithfull, too. It was a quick session, only two or three takes. They all left the studio and crowded into a car to take Faithfull back to the station. Released in June of 1964 on the Stones’ label, Decca, “As Tears Go By” was, as Oldham predicted, a big hit, but not only that. It gave Faithfull the first part of a great pop myth and began her association with the Stones, though not immediately her romance with Mick. “As Tears Go By” really is the beginning of that romance, as it binds them forever in time.
While he publicly dismissed it as “girly,” Mick Jagger knew this was a gateway song, one that would allow them to experiment with ballads. Shortly after its completion they would work slow songs like Arthur Alexander’s melodramatic “You Better Move On” and their own “Tell Me” convincingly into their repertoire. The Stones themselves recorded “As Tears Go By” after all. It was released in December of ’65, closing the year of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” and the Moody Blues’ “Go Now.” All those songs, along with Jagger’s version of “As Tears Go By,” truly marked a new era for elegantly melancholy pop that would influence goose-pimple masterpieces like the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” and the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee.” “It’s the mystery of songwriting,” Asher says. “Where they come from. When I first heard it I thought, Oh wow, Mick and Keith can write songs like that. They’re not just trying to copy their R&B heroes anymore. It’s clearly why they’re still here.”
Faithfull concurs. “It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written,” she recalled. “A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened (between us). It’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song. A lot of people felt that way.”
By 1966, Mick Jagger had finally won the love of Faithfull, freeing himself from Chrissie Shrimpton for good and stealing Marianne from John Dunbar—and waiting out Faithfull’s initial fixation with Keith. Inside of a year, they’d become the prince and princess of the Chelsea scene that Mick coveted. And as time went by, of course, they’d find themselves torn apart, but they remain connected in myth. When Martin Scorsese filmed “As Tears Go By” for Shine a Light, he shot Mick in majestic profile; his voice low with age, he enunciates every word, like a Shakespearean actor playing Lear or Prospero—slow, careful, and true. Faithfull rerecorded it as well in middle age. “I rerecorded it at age forty and at that moment I was exactly the right age and in the right frame of mind to sing it. It was then that I truly experienced the lyrical melancholy of the song for the first time,” she said.
“You know, it’s like a metaphor for being old: You’re watching children playing and realizing you’re not a child,” Mick reflected in 1995. “It’s a relatively mature song considering the rest of the output at the time. And we didn’t think of doing it [initially], because the Rolling Stones were a butch blues group.” After “As Tears Go By,” they were so much more.
When I interviewed Faithfull for the Vanity Fair site, I asked her if her relationship to the song has changed over the years. “Yes, it does,” she said. “But I still really like it. You know, I was very lucky with the Stones song I got. Because it’s really good. A lot of people didn’t get such a good Stones song when they recorded a Rolling Stones cover. I got the best.” When I reminded her that she gave them something in return as well, a big pop hit that afforded them some confidence to kick with the new, sensitive, feminine-side tapping pop fray, she agreed. “Yeah, of course I did.” Thinking of Mick’s rendition in the Scorsese film (which she apparently has not seen), I ask her what it feels like to sing “As Tears Go By” now, in her sixties. “I feel like it’s a very old friend.”
5
“We Piss Anywhere, Man”
The Rolling Stones of 1965 had hits, they had sex appeal, they even had sensitivity after “As Tears Go By.” They had everything but that one crucial ingredient that would make them more than the pop sensations of the previous ages: a philosophy. By ’65 this was now expected of rock and rollers. “Pop stars of the late ’50s and early’60s were working-class kids who jumped on the Elvis bandwagon,” says Keith Altham. “They were sixteen, seventeen. Most had very little formal education. With the Beatles and the Stones, they came from a slightly better-educated background. You found yourself talking to young guys who’d taken their A-levels. Jagger was a part of that. A pop star had opinions—and consequently there became a slightly more serious approach in interviews. Bob Dylan was probably a catalyst in this respect.” In ’65, twenty-four-year-old Bob Dylan had hit singles and teenage fans but was also queried by the media as they might a middle-aged or elderly politician; he was obliged to explain his lyrics, what he was protesting, what he believed in and stood for. Mick, Keith, and Brian Jones, like the Beatles, found Dylan both inspiring and intimidating, especially when the implication was often that beat combos like the Stones didn’t have the sophistication of a poet and a leader like Dylan. Even Dylan himself famously quipped, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Blowing in the Wind.’ ”
By the winter of ’65, the Stones, active for three years, with Mick and Keith only just moving into their own domiciles after bunking together first with Brian and later with Andrew Loog Oldham and Mick’s soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton, were marketed as gang-like, a posse of Droogs marauding; primal where Dylan was cerebral.
Oldham played down Mick and Keith’s middle-class origins whenever possible. “He always made sure we were as violent and nasty as possible,” Mick has said. Oldham had even looked into optioning the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange as the band’s own noir version of A Hard Day’s Night and Help (but ultimately failed to secure the rights). Whereas Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman was ursine and imperious, protecting his boy from the world, Oldham saw his charges as five shaggy hand grenades and gleefully threw them at the established guard. “We realized right from the beginning that we were making our appeal to young people,” he told N.M.E. at the time, “and by making a concentrated effort towards freedom on their behalf we would upset those we neglected. We chose the young instead of the old, that’s all. The old resented it. The Stones are still the social outcasts, the rebels. We worked on the principle that if you are going to kick conformity in the teeth, you may as well use both feet.” It was Oldham who composed the neo-beat poetry printed on their album sleeves, and Oldham who employed the group’s natural insolence and pouting faces to draw stark lines between the old world and the new. The Stones’ give-and-take with the British media was as intricate and masterful as any Tin Pan Alley craftsman could ever hope to be. In fact, it can be argued that Mick Jagger�
��s greatest philosophical statement of that crucial year of 1965 is not “I can’t get no satisfaction,” but rather “We piss anywhere, man,” uttered on a cold night in front of a petrol station that refused them use of a toilet. This is in no way meant to minimize the seismic “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which is now so overplayed that it’s underplayed; have a listen today and you will be reminded of what a truly thrilling single it is. People write this about “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” of course. It routinely tops lists of Greatest Ever This or Best That of All Time to the point that we feel we perhaps don’t need to listen to it anymore, but it’s appearance in a Summer 2010 episode of Mad Men (taking us back to the summer of ’65 and perfectly articulating chain-smoking Don Draper’s own frustration with useless information) was like ice water to a booze-flushed cheek. “Oh yeah! That song.” And still “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” alpha song that it is, work of art that it is, is still just a song. “We piss anywhere” is an ideology.
The whole incident lasted only about two minutes, the length of a great vintage pop song, but in its own way, it was more powerful, and far more political, than many of the Stones hits that came afterward. “We piss anywhere” was “released” on March 18, 1965, and took only a day or two to climb the “charts” and stir up the kind of attention that would help the Stones’ crossover, like Dylan’s, from pop concern to political football. They were now “spokesmen,” for the “do what I like set,” as Altham would write in N.M.E. the following year.
In the John Ford–ian sense, the legend has already been printed and the actual details are less important, but here’s how it probably went down. The Stones, a new UK No. 1 to their credit after “Little Red Rooster,” their sultry Willie Dixon–penned sex bomb, topped the charts shortly before the winter holidays, were returning from another sold-out and riotous gig in a movie theater in Romford. It was just after midnight and bitter cold. All five were piled into their black Daimler touring car.
Feeling nature’s call, the group stopped at a Francis Petrol station in Stratford outside of London. At first, they were polite. Bill Wyman asked the attendant, a clean-cut gent named Charles Keeley, if he could please be directed to the bathroom as the others got out and stretched. Keeley, like much of his generation, knew who the Stones were but had yet to come around to them. He’d been working all night in the cold, and at this hour, he didn’t care for the looks of them. He ordered the group to get back in and keep driving. When they complained, Mick Jagger took command of the situation, nudged Keeley back, and announced, “We’ll piss anywhere, man.”
In his testimony, Keeley described being surrounded in the dark by “shaggy haired monsters” who all began chanting in unison : “We’ll piss anywhere! We’ll piss anywhere!” “One danced to the phrase,” Keeley recalled. As if to prove this, Wyman proceeded to unzip his fly and urinate on the garage wall. The Stones then piled back into the Daimler and they sped off, giving the reverse victory salute through the window.
Again, the actual details of this event are somewhat fuzzy (“We’ll piss” got shortened to the more universal “We piss” over time). It’s been reported that it was Brian Jones and not Mick Jagger who said it, and that both Brian and Mick, not just Bill Wyman, did the peeing anywhere.
When Keeley telephoned the authorities, the Stones were charged days later with disturbing the peace and given an appearance date before the local magistrate, who called them “morons” and berated them for the length of their hair, their “filthy” clothes, and “clown[ish] behavior.”
Mick’s response was atypical of his good, middle-class manners, but he likely could not control himself. He was still pumping adrenaline from the concert. And he truly did have enough, after yet another stress-inducing gig in the midst of another long, promotional tour. Characteristic or not, the outburst was seized on by both the press and teenagers all over the Western world who had been looked at sideways because they traveled in gangs and looked like trouble when they only wanted to get out of the cold, get some food, and have a pee. It became an exemplary and heroic moment ; the logical next step after asserting the power of the teenage dollar: demanding teenage respect. It all made great copy. “Andrew saw how the Stones rebelled against conformity, in contrast to how the Beatles were controlled by Epstein,” Altham has said, “and he saw the value in letting them have their heads. Then—and this was both his genius and his Achilles’ heel—he saw it could be exaggerated, taken a step further and made to look as though they were working-class heroes. They weren’t—yet. They were middle-class kids rebelling against a middle-class background.”
The notion that the Stones should act in a way that would firmly establish them as volatile Cains to the Beatles’ true blue Abels was already planted in the band members’ heads, and so here was the water-passing, watershed moment. The Beatles pissed where pissing was designated. The Stones did what they liked. The Beatles played the palace at the Queen’s request. The Stones would just as soon storm the place.
“We piss anywhere” made it OK for boys to swoon over the Stones as well. Like the Beatles, they drew both men and women to their shows, but the young men must have felt less conflicted screaming along to the Stones. Losing their composure at a Rolling Stones show was merely an initiation rite, kind of like the pledge of fidelity to a gang.
“As manager, what Oldham did was to take everything implicit in the Stones and blow it up one hundred times. Long-haired and ugly and anarchic as they were, Oldham made them more so and he turned them into everything that parents would most hate, be most frightened by. All the time, he goaded them to be wilder, nastier, fouler in every way, and they were—they swore, sneered, snarled, and, deliberately, they came [off as] cretinous,” British journalist Nik Cohn writes in his collection Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom . “It was good basic psychology: Kids might see them the first time and not be sure about them, but then they’d hear their parents whining about those animals, those filthy long-haired morons, and suddenly they’d be converted, they’d identify like mad.”
Oldham next came up with a slogan: “Would you let your sister go with a Rolling Stone?” It ran atop a feature in an issue of another extremely important (and now sadly defunct) British music weekly, Melody Maker. “The headline was a great example of everlasting meaning via product placement,” Oldham writes. “I had dreamt up the line ‘Would you let your daughter go with a Rolling Stone?’ which would be translated into ‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?’ by the high priests of Fleet Street, who wished to avoid the ramifications of the word ‘go’ . . . it got the headline and became one of the many slogans wrapped around the Rolling Stones for life.” The notion of a good, virginal English lass bringing a surly, chain smoking, black man–worshipping, and now wealthy and insouciant sex lout home for tea drew a panic tantamount to a mini Red Menace. It was a hit single without music.
Of all the British Invasion bands, the still feral Stones on the surface had actually seemed to change the least from the streetlevel club act they’d been. They only flirted with wearing identical uniforms once, before dropping the idea forever. It was their first-ever TV appearance, playing their debut Decca single on Thank Your Lucky Stars, a British version of American Bandstand, on July 7, 1963. The Stones appeared in matching black trousers, checked sport coats with velvet collars, blue shirts, leather vests, and black knit wool ties. “Originally Andrew put them in the houndstooth jackets and leather gear so that they had some uniform presence,” N.M.E. writer Keith Altham says in Oldham’s memoir, “contemporary to the Beatles. Gradually he realized that it wasn’t gonna work and they weren’t gonna wear them.” The show was flooded with letters protesting their long hair and general scruffy demeanor despite the attempt at being presentable. The band soon realized that they couldn’t win and might as well go full tilt in the other direction. Letters of protest, after all, amounted to good press. This would come to be a freedom that the Beatles would envy. “Paul was jealous,” Peter Asher rec
alls. “They got to wear whatever they wanted, whereas Brian Epstein made them wear these fucking suits.”
John Lennon felt jealous that they were permitted to exult in bad-boy reverie while the Beatles were bound to a lovable “mop top” image. This isn’t to say the Stones were immune to packaging. Oldham had successfully lobbied to remove Stewart from the Stones-proper lineup. Stu’s Jay Leno jaw and lack of androgyny was deemed a marketing liability, and so he was relegated to erstwhile pianist and roadie. “Look, from the first time I saw you, I’ve felt I can only see . . . five Rolling Stones,” Oldham informed them. “People worked nine to five, and they couldn’t be expected to remember more than four faces. ‘This is entertainment, not a memory test.’ ” The way they looked, their image, as much if not more than how they sounded, or what, if any, philosophy they actually had, was the most important concern, but by 1965, their actions began to take on greater cultural significance.